The cat-whisperer

Last week, I was back in farm country visiting Schmidt again. I spent all day on Saturday the 9 driving there, and all day on Monday the 18 driving home. Marie visited too during the exact same stretch, except that she went back home the next day. We visited some, listened to music, watched some old movies, and generally hung out. Some notes follow.  

What was the occasion?

Schmidt had hernia surgery scheduled for Monday the 11. His doctors told him not to lift anything heavy for six weeks after. Schmidt had already explained to us that he had no intention of following this instruction literally, because he knew ways to use leverage to make the work easier on his healing incision. And he made a big point of saying that he could manage by himself if he had to. But he needed someone to drive him home from the hospital, because he would still have a lot of opiates in his system then. And yes, he supposed he could use some help with a few tasks around the farm in the early days.

So Marie and I came to visit. We drove him home, and we fixed dinners for a week. When we all went out shopping, I carried the big carton of cat litter that he bought (to supplement one he already owned). He pushed the cart so that he could lean on it. So I guess we helped in little ways. We also kept him company.

The cat-whisperer

Schmidt discussed his approach to training cats. (See also this post and this one.) He actually used the phrase "cat whisperer" for himself, as an allusion or hommage to the work of Buck Brannaman (see also this documentary), who has been nicknamed "the horse whisperer." Schmidt's basic point is the same as Buck's: it is your job to understand the animal you want to train. You can't expect the cat (or horse) to understand you, or to think like a human being. You have to think like a cat (or horse), and use that insight to encourage the behaviors you want. Schmidt went on to say that the conventional myth about cats being arrogant and uncooperative is just that—a myth and no more. He said that using his methods, he has had geat success—within reasonable limits, of course—getting his cats to do what he wants.

Schmidt and Marie talked about cats a lot. I didn't have much to contribute to those conversations.

Could Wife have Asperger's?, 3

OK, the last time I asked this was five years ago. I think the answer is definitely "Yes" based on lots of experiences that are all more or less summed up in this post. Wife herself thinks the answer is "No" (or that's what she said when I asked her), as described in this post and then this one right after.

But then this evening I was reading John Michael Greer's Ecosophia blog, specifically the comments to this post, and he makes the following remarks in comment #58:

My late wife was the same way — she was on the autism spectrum, and from late childhood on preferred to hang with boys (and then men) rather than girls (and then women) because she disliked the informal-power realm and never could do it well. That’s one of the reasons why she became the first female presiding officer of an Odd Fellows lodge in Washington state; when the Odd Fellows decided to let women join, the brothers of my lodge (who all knew her via social and charitable activities) asked her to join and then voted her into the big chair because they all knew her, liked her, and knew she’d follow the rules of formal power rather than trying to twist them into comformity with the ways of informal power.   

I read this, and right away I thought of Wife's career as a high school teacher.

She spent four years teaching at all-boys Catholic high schools. (That's one year before graduate school, and three years after.) Then she finally had a chance to teach at an all-girls Catholic high school. She jumped at the chance: partly for practical reasons (it was a lot closer to home, and her daily commute had become very difficult), but mostly for idealistic reasons. Wife called herself a feminist. She had gone to an all-women's college, and valued all-female spaces. She looked forward eagerly to training young women so that they could achieve the best they had in them.

Be careful what you wish for.

Wife was very successful in teaching boys, but she failed utterly at teaching girls. She held that job for only one year. If she had not been accepted at another graduate school after that (which rendered moot any question of her further employment) she would surely have been fired, and might have had to go back to secretarial work.

Of course I wasn't on campus. I had my own job. But the way she described it, the girls were all two-faced and treacherous.She often summarized the difference like this:

Back when I was teaching boys, I'd do something one of the boys didn't like and right away he'd shout out in the middle of class, "Oh, Mrs. Tanatu, that isn't even fair!" Then I'd tell him, "Suck it up, Johnson, this isn't a democracy." And we'd be done—the whole problem would be over. But with the girls, any time I do something they don't like they smile and smile just as sweet as pie. I never even know there's a problem. But then they go tell all their other teachers that I'm picking on them, and the other teachers come and ask me quietly, "Why are you being so mean to Sonya? Or Tanya? Or Suzie? Or Betty?" And these little conversations in the hallway are the first I've heard of it! I literally never knew there was a problem before this. But now the whole faculty thinks I have some kind of crazed vendetta against this or that girl, just because she never turns in her homework and wants me to coddle her anyway. God, but I miss teaching boys!

Is it just me, or does that sound pretty much exactly like what Greer says about his late wife? That she—like my Wife—understood formal power and could work with it effectively, but that she—also like my Wife—was totally at sea when it came to informal power, those quiet conversations in the hallway, and the focus on whether you like someone rather than on whether she's following the rules.

Sara Greer was like this because she was on the autism spectrum. Isn't it the most natural thing to assume that Wife was also somewhere on that spectrum, if she got identical results? 

   

Why do I court failure?

At one point back in 2016, when we first got back together, Marie told me that decades earlier—when we knew each other in college—she had been racking her brains trying to figure out why we got along so well. That sounds like a strange thing to say, but here's what she meant by it.

By the time she was in middle school, Marie's home life was hopelessly dysfunctional: her father had committed suicide, and her mother was a blackout drunk who had once molested her all the way to orgasm (back when Marie was 12 and didn't understand what was going on). See, for example, this post and this one. And when Marie looked around at her friends, the only ones she felt naturally at-ease with were the ones whose home lives were equally dysfunctional. So she just figured that's how it was: she was messed up, and the only people she could really relax around were equally messed up.

Then she met me, and right away felt at ease around me. So she tried to create conversational openings to let me explain how my family was dysfunctional, while she shared how her family was dysfunctional. She figured it would be a bonding exercise.

Only I never took the bait. On the one hand, I had long since internalized the rule that you Never Talk Your Family Down to Others. And on the other hand, I genuinely didn't understand that there was anything dysfunctional about us. By conventional standards we were all pretty normal. My dad sometimes drank a lot, but not to the point that he ever lost his job or got into fights. My parents stayed married during ten disastrous years of running a business that they hated and didn't understand (or not at first). We didn't have a lot of money, but somehow we got by. So I never had any lurid tales of dysfunction to share with Marie, and she was left baffled. How can I possibly feel so at ease with him when he and his family are so normal?

In the first couple of months that we were back in communication, she kept probing at this point until I finally asked her to stop. Also after a couple of months we started fucking, and we had better things to talk about.

Over time, of course, I have come to have a clearer understanding of some of the mind games that Father played ... mostly not, I think, out of actual malice, but in an attempt to placate some of his own demons. And I've talked about how he interacted with me using a power dynamic that felt very sexual, even if we both had our clothes on. (See, for example, this post and this post; for a more light-hearted approach, you might also try this post.)

But just this evening, I thought of a neat formula that summarizes the profound ambivalence—and that's putting it nicely!—that I feel about great achievement.

Father forced me to feel pride in my achievements in the same way that Marie's mother forced her to feel orgasms.

I'm not sure I have stories to back that up—well, I've got one but I'm not ready to share it yet. Other than that one, I think it mostly took the form of little remarks here and there by the way, bits and bobs that I probably can't remember accurately or at all but that contributed to an overall ambience of expectations.

But the end result for both of us was very similar. 

• For years, Marie could not take pleasure in sex, or at best she could take only the limpest and most qualified form of pleasure. 
• For years, I have not been able to take pleasure in my achievements, or only the limpest and most qualified form of pleasure.

What does this look like in practice?

• When people praise Son1 and Son2, I agree that they have both grown into fine young men; but I insist that parents don't have a lot of influence on that, and that the credit goes to them for choosing to become so good. The only parenting victory that I will own is my forcing Wife to let both boys go to boarding school, in order to get them away from the two of us!
• Back when I was working, my greatest victories at work were the kind of thing where I could easily say, "Everyone came together as a team and did their parts really well. All I had to contribute was a little organization, and taking minutes." And you can bet that's exactly what I said.
• I have confessed to you lot (who would never tell a soul, and besides I'm hiding behind a mask) that yes, in odd moments I have occasionally felt little wisps of pride in my ancient academic achievements, back during the Buchanan Administration; I have also said that those wisps of pride feel like "a really degrading sexual fetish," or like "masturbating in public." And of course you remember the cartoon I posted about it all. 

So honestly I think it's a pretty good analogy. It captures just how slimy and unclean I feel around the whole topic of achievement.

And how much cleaner I feel around failure, by comparison. 

P.S.: I think this insight helps explain much of the ambivalence I have around school and anything that looks like it. I've talked about that a lot over the years, but see especially this post and this one. Now I'm wrestling with the question how much of this post about Marie applies to me too. I think any simple answer will be wrong, and that the true answer is "Not 100% but also not 0%."

  

Failed again

Yesterday—good Lord, was it only yesterday?—I had a totally pointless fight with Son 1. I don't even know if "fight" is the right word. All I know is that—ironically for someone who talks and writes as much as I do—sometimes I really suck at explaining what I mean. (As a point of comparison, consider, "I never could teach my sons to do their math homework.")

If you are reading this and you have any suggestions for how I can fix it, please leave me a note in the comments. 

Background

It all started ... well no, it started long before that. Years ago, when the boys were first graduating from college and starting out on their own, they authorized me to have access to their bank accounts. From time to time they needed little boosts of cash while they were getting their footing in the real world, and it was easier for me simply to transfer funds than to write a check, mail it, wait for it to arrive, and wait for them to deposit it.

But it turns out that an arrangement like this is a lot easier to set up than it is to discontinue. The only way to cancel it is for the owner of the account (this means, respectively, either Son 1 or Son 2) to walk into the bank and ask for a new account number. (Actually two new numbers, one for checking and one for savings.) Then as the bank sets up the new accounts and transfers over all the history from old to new, the account owner has to say, "Oh yeah, one more thing: don't put my Dad on the new accounts." This is cumbersome. Also it's a nuisance in case (for example) the account owner has set up Direct Deposit for his paycheck, because now he has to re-set it with the new account number. Then he has to wait for the bank to issue new ATM cards, and all that. It's a pain. And since at this point Son 1 and Son 2 each live somewhere else, we haven't gotten around to dealing with it.

It's weird. If Father had ever had access to one of my bank accounts (which he never did, once I was in college), I would have been eager to shut off that access as soon as I possibly could. I suppose in some sense it is a vote of confidence that the boys have been so blasé about the issue.

Exercises in compassion, part 2

As I mentioned in the earlier post, the dharma teacher at this meditation retreat integrated his spiritual teachings with a political point of view. Occasionally this made his teachings sound distinctly un-Buddhist, like the time that he suggested that We often believe that our moral authority is proportional to the extent to which we cling to our views, and to our moral anger at the malefactors in public life. He spent several minutes describing this perspective, and seemingly warming to it. The attendees were lapping it up. Finally he said No, no, it's all false and this approach doesn't work. Clinging-to-views isn't a productive way forward after all. (But I wonder how many people truly heard him say that.)

But as he discussed these things, he introduced the concept of "pathological do-gooders," or "pathological altruism." This is when someone just can't stop doing things for others, or when someone does things for others with a reckless disregard for his own well-being, or indeed for any cost to himself at all. I think the teacher's motivation must have been that many of his listeners sub­consciously believe that to be their moral ideal. That's what they believe they ought to be doing! Of course that's crazy, but consider the audience. And much of the teacher's advice here was very sound and sober. He reminded us that "Caring is costly," and that if we cling too tightly to our ideal of eliminating all suffering everywhere, we will burn out. One of the most basic Buddhist teachings, after all, is that clinging causes dukkha, or suffering. So to the extent that he was able to wean people away from their fantasies of redeeming the world, his teaching was entirely orthodox and wholesome.

What caught my attention was one of his incidental comments. He may have been quoting another author—my notes don't say, and I don't remember for sure. But he pointed out that there is one circumstance—and only one!—where "pathological do-gooders" seem normal, and where it seems the most natural thing in the world to throw away all other considerations in order to help others.

That one, unique circumstance is war. (Then as an afterthought he included floods, earthquakes, and other natural disasters as more or less equivalent.)

My first reaction was a sardonic smile: Gosh, could someone spin this into making a Buddhist argument for more wars? But then I began mulling.

In his classic memoir Storm of Steel, Ernst Jünger describes that when World War One broke out, Germans greeted it with enthusiastic idealism.

Movies made after World War Two—movies like The Best Years of Our Lives (1946) and The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit (1956)—treated as a commonplace the trouble that soldiers had returning to civilian life, because it lacks all the unity, cameraderie, ésprit, meaning, and purpose of life under fire.

Even an antiwar vehicle like the television series M*A*S*H could not help but celebrate the common purpose of the team at the (fictional) "4077th Mobile Army Surgical Hospital" during the Korean War. The last episode, in which a ceasefire goes into effect and the characters all go home, is both celebratory and deeply poignant. 

And surely we have all heard stories of people who accomplished deeds of great bravery and daring in wartime, who rescued their team from certain death with no thought of their own safety, who nonetheless could never settle down in peacetime and make something of themselves. The image feels like it should be a commonplace. Isn't it?

War puts all conventional values in question. 

• Rank and status? Sure, they matter. But the man commanding an assault might be killed in the next moment; and any grunt with gumption and initiative can be given a battlefield promotion to take his place.
• Wealth and acquisition? Anything you have acquired can be lost just as easily. But unexpected loot can also be found. It all comes down to luck, although some people may argue that the valorous tend to be luckier than the cowardly.
• Comfort? As if!

So maybe it is possible to understand Jünger's talk of "idealism." Maybe I wasn't crazy a couple of years ago to argue that the experience of war really is the experience of "pure dynamic Quality" seen through a Social lens. Maybe when all life is being lived on the extreme edge, it makes sense that extreme, pathological altruism becomes the order of the day.

This is not an argument for more wars. But it does leave me with some sense of why certain authors have found peacetime petty and squalid and corrupt, compared with the moral purity they feel they have touched in war.

Maybe we, as humans, truly are made for war and catastrophe, not for peace and prosperity.

It's a conundrum. 

          

Exercises in compassion, part 1

A week ago, I attended a weekend-long non-residential retreat at the local State University. The theme was "Love in Turbulent Times"; based on my sense of the practitioners and the attendees, it could probably have been subtitled "How to Preserve Equanimity When the Bad Guys Won the Last Election." The dharma teacher tried valiantly to keep overt political statements out of his talks, but didn't really succeed. I wasn't surprised: I know this town and at least some of the local Buddhist community, so I expected that going in. And mostly it wasn't political, or not very.

He talked about compassion, among other topics, and this is one of the themes I found myself pondering. In particular, I remember when I first read Jack Kornfield's A Path With Heart, Kornfield wrote that one of the ways to test whether your spiritual path is a healthy one is to check whether you have become more open and compassionate with time, or more isolated and hard-hearted? (I discuss this passage in this post from eleven years ago.) So I asked myself: Am I more compassionate than I used to be? And I answered, Partly yes. I think I am more compassionate towards people I know, like Wife or Father. Certainly I get angry at them a lot less. What's less clear is whether I am more compassionate towards strangers, and the dharma teacher seemed to put some emphasis on compassion towards strangers in his talks. (You could probably use this recent post to argue that my compassion for strangers is not high.) On the other hand, I wonder how often "compassion for strangers" counts as real compassion, and how often it is merely performative, in order to make the do-gooder look good? So I've got something to meditate on.

Then the morning of the second day, I was confronted with a concrete exercise in compassion! I got to the university early, and pulled into the parking lot. As I pulled in, I saw one party just walking away. They were elderly, obviously not University people, and obviously attendees of the meditation retreat. So far, so good. But when I got to the parking kiosk, I realized they had walked off without paying. More exactly, they had activated the parking kiosk, and had recorded their license plate number. But they had not actually fed the machine any money! I assume this negligence has to have been caused by confusion or ignorance; if they had intended to park-and-dash, they wouldn't have initiated the process. What should I do?

I thought about it while paying for my own parking, and for too many minutes thereafter. I saw three options:

1. Forget about the problem. In that case, campus parking enforcement would probably give them a ticket.
2. Write down their license number, and then ask around at the retreat "Is this your car? You need to go back and pay for your parking!"
3. Just pay their damned parking myself. (It didn't cost much.)

As I say, I spent way too much time thinking about this. In the end, I just paid for their parking. It seemed the easiest thing to do. (Strictly speaking, I guess it would have been easier to do nothing. But it would have bugged me if they had actually gotten a ticket.)

I do not know whether my decision was influenced by my rumination the previous day on the role of compassion in my life.  

Then the dharma teacher's remarks the second day sent my thoughts down a whole new path! See Part Two for details. 

    

Golden Bough in concert

OK, here's something different. The Celtic folk band Golden Bough, in concert.

I didn't attend in-person, but I did get a link to watch it live-streamed.

There were a few hiccups and glitches, but they are still recognizable.

They are still a delight to listen to.

One warning: you have to advance the video past the 16:00 mark (that's 16 minutes!) before you get anything. But after that it should be fine. Leave me a note if it's not.

I can't get Blogger to put up a window, but here is the link.